Hasbro Interactive

X-COM: Alliance is a cancelled FPS / Strategy game that was in development in 1999 / 2000 by Hasbro Interactive’s Chipping Sodbury office in the UK and later by their studio in Hunt Valley, USA. As we can read in Wikipedia, unlike other games in the X-COM series, most of which were turn-based strategy, the game had the player assume the role of a trooper in an X-COM squad and through the first-person perspective of a squaddie, to fight the hostile alien invaders. At the end of 1999, the Hunt Valley studio survived the first round of studio closures enacted by Hasbro Interactive when they decided to scale back their efforts in the video game industry. Later in 2000, however, the Hunt Valley studio was also closed down and the game was “shelved”.

As we can read on Wikipedia, X-COM: Genesis is a cancelled RTS in the X-COM series, that was in development by MicroProse and then by Hasbro Interactive. The game was never completed due to Hasbro’s shutdown of Hasbro Interactive in late 1999. For this project the team developed a “Geoscape” view of Earth from orbit, that far surpassed the implementation in previous versions.

The team also created a level editor to allow the artists to build levels for the “Battlescape”—the areas where battles against the alien invaders would take place. In an early tech demo we can see an urban environment with a filling station, warehouse, an apartment building, attached parking garage, a park, a burning trashbin and streetlights that cast pools of light. Floating above it all was a blimp with floodlights streaming earthward. Standing in formation outside their aircraft were the X-COM soldiers, shifting on their feet, looking left to right.

As for the “true to the original game” part, absolutely! Genesis was designed to follow the same basic game formula as UFO Defense and Terror from the Deep—research, buying/building, recruiting, intercepting UFOs, and fighting tactical missions. The mechanics of the game in the strategy layer (the Geoscape and all related screens) were virtually identical to those of the first two games. The combat portion of the game was going to have a very similar feel, but it would have had slightly different mechanics (real-time, for instance—more on that later).

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